Archive for September 20th, 2011

It took me a long time to love CitizenKane. When I first saw this most famous of all movies, which was finally released last week on a gorgeous Blu-ray, I was maybe ten years old, and already steeped, believe it or not, in the culture of such movie lists as the Sight & Sound poll. (I got an early start at being an obsessive film snob.) And my first viewing of Kane, which I knew had been universally acclaimed as the best film of all time, came as something of a shock. Looking back, I think my biggest issue was with the film’s insistent humor, since I had assumed that all great art had to be deadly serious. Xanadu and its brooding shadows were fine, but when we got to the moment when the stagehand holds his nose at Susan Alexander’s operatic debut, I didn’t know what to think. What kind of masterpiece was this, anyway?

Needless to say, in the years since, this sense of fun has become one of my favorite things about Kane, as it was for Pauline Kael and so many others. Like Hamlet, with its ghosts and swordfights, Kane is both popular and sublime, and it’s one of the first movies to directly communicate to the audience the director’s joy in his craft—the sense that a movie studio was “the biggest electric train set a boy ever had.” As Kael points out in “Raising Kane,” the movie is almost a series of blackout sketches, full of tricks and gags, and that underlying pleasure still comes through, especially in the earlier newspaper scenes, which feel like a glimpse of the RKO set itself: the Inquirer, with its exhausted but grateful staff, becomes a dream of all creative collaboration, the warmest memory in a movie that ends with the line “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”

And yet, as I’ve grown older, I’m also struck by the undercurrent of sadness and loss, which prompted David Thomson to say, in Rosebud: “This is the most moving picture ever made…Or ever will be.” More than any other film, Kane grows with time, both in the context of film history and in its viewers’ own lives. For one thing, it’s hard to watch it now without seeing it as a prophetic version of what would happen to Orson Welles himself, still only twenty-five and a little more than a baby in the few times he appears in his own face. Welles was a greater man than Kane, but he was already preparing his own warehouse of memories, that incredible mass of stories, myths, and unfinished projects that he carried with him like an invisible Xanadu. Of all great directors, only Coppola—with the ghosts of Zoetrope and the Corleones lingering at the Rubicon estate—can claim to be so haunted.

But Kane isn’t really about Welles himself, but all of us. There’s a reason why such disparate figures as Charles Schulz and Ted Turner have seen themselves in this story: among other things, it’s our best movie about youth and aging. Now that I’ve long since passed the age at which Welles made this film, I’m convinced that there’s no way I could fully appreciate it until now: when you’re twenty-five, the movie seems like a goad, or an exemplar, and it’s only when you’re a little older that you notice its preemptive nostalgia for the promise of youth already lost. I expect that the movie will continue to evolve and show different aspects as I get older, a hall of mirrors, like the one Kane walks through in his very last appearance. It’s an inspiration and a warning, a labyrinth without a center, as Borges writes. And yet running that newspaper still seems like so much fun.